Bruno da Silva, Silva & Cosens and a merger that settled the name.

Dow’s is a Port house whose name came last. The company says its story begins in 1798, when Bruno da Silva, a Portuguese merchant from Porto, travelled to London and began importing the wines of his home country — the opposite journey, the company notes, to the one most Port merchants of the time were making. The founding date the house carries today therefore comes from that London trade rather than from a lodge in Portugal.

The firm’s next name came with the next generation. According to the company, Bruno’s son John da Silva went into partnership with Frederick William Cosens in 1862, creating Silva & Cosens; the wine writer Chris Kissack’s The Wine Doctor gives the same year and the same two partners. The company says George Warre, from one of the long-established British families of the Port trade, joined them in 1868.

The decisive step came in 1877, when Silva & Cosens merged with another Port shipper, Dow & Co. Dow & Co. was the smaller of the two, the company says, but it had a particularly strong reputation for its Vintage Ports, and so the merged business chose to sell its wine under the name Dow’s. The company credits James R. Dow, the senior figure at Dow & Co., with the tasting expertise behind that reputation. It is an unusual inheritance: the brand on the label is the name of the junior partner in the merger, chosen because of what it already stood for in the Vintage Port trade, while the older firm’s own name faded into the company’s legal history.

From then on the name and the wines travelled together. The house’s Vintage Ports — the wines from a single exceptional harvest, declared and bottled young to age for decades — became the centre of its reputation, and in time Decanter would include the Dow’s 1955 Vintage Port in its “Wine Legend” series.

A Scottish partner, a quinta at Pinhão and a drier house style.

The family most associated with Dow’s arrived in the trade a few years after the merger. English Wikipedia says Andrew James Symington came to Porto from Scotland in 1882 and first worked for Graham’s, became a partner in Warre & Co. in 1905 and became a partner in Dow’s in 1912. The company dates the Symington connection to the same year and says five generations of Symington winemakers have worked on its wines since.

The vineyards came from the Douro valley in northern Portugal, the only region where Port can be made. The Dow’s home is Quinta do Bomfim, an estate just outside the riverside village of Pinhão. The Drinks Business reported in May 2015 that Bomfim had originally been acquired by Dow’s in 1896, and that the family had opened a visitor centre there, in the old winery and its historic vat cellar, as the number of tourists coming to Porto and the Douro was rising. Harpers reported the opening of the same visitor attraction that month. Bomfim also gives its name to a Dow’s single-quinta Port; Chris Kissack’s The Wine Doctor has published tasting notes on several of its vintages.

A second estate has a longer and more broken history. The wine site Wine Anorak says Quinta da Senhora da Ribeira, further up the Douro towards the Spanish border, was in Symington hands until the 1950s, when it was sold during hard times, and was bought back in 1998; the 1998 Quinta Senhora da Ribeira was the first wine the family made after it returned. Wine Spectator has described Senhora da Ribeira as one of the Symingtons’ most prized vineyard estates.

Style is the house’s main argument. The company describes its Ports as having a “distinctive drier finish”, and it places that style alongside its estates and its family partnership at the centre of how it presents the brand.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all port and sherry names: Sandeman, Graham’s, Taylor’s, Cockburn’s, Dow’s, Tío Pepe and Harveys. Port and sherry brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A port or sherry brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine is actually made, aged and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One Port house inside a family group.

Dow’s is now one of several Port names run by the same family. English Wikipedia says the Symingtons bought Graham’s and Smith Woodhouse in 1970, became partners in the Madeira Wine Company and bought Quinta do Vesuvio in 1989, added dry Douro table wines in 1999 and the Chryseia brand in 2001. The family business, Symington Family Estates, keeps Dow’s as a distinct house with its own estates and its own style inside that group, alongside Graham’s.

The house’s best-known modern recognition came from the American press. Wine Spectator named the Dow’s 2011 Vintage Port its Wine of the Year for 2014, the top place in the magazine’s annual Top 100, with a score of 99 points; the magazine noted that the wine drew heavily on the Bomfim and Senhora da Ribeira estates. The company also says its 2007 Vintage Port received a perfect 100-point score from Wine Spectator.

The way the house speaks about itself has stayed close to that history. Its own account leads with the 1798 London merchant, the 1877 merger and the 1912 partnership, and with the quintas that supply its declared vintages, rather than with a single emblem or figure. The name itself is a possessive surname: the junior partner’s name, kept for its standing in the Vintage Port trade in 1877.

The name needs care online. “Dow” on its own is also the name of an American chemicals company and of the Dow Jones stock index; the house’s own site is dows-port.com, and the apostrophe matters when searching for the wine.

For a design guide, Dow’s shows how a merger can decide a brand: two firms joined in 1877 and chose the name with the stronger reputation, and the house has carried that choice, rather than a picture, for nearly a century and a half. Compare Graham’s, the Port house the same family bought in 1970, and Taylor’s, another of the old British-named Port shippers. For this guide we use Port ruby, Douro schist and lodge gold with a book serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Dow’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.